The closed beta of the newest online version of the wildly popular trading card game Magic: the Gathering just began to roll out earlier this month, leaving those of us who love the game wondering where will it fit in the constellation of various online play methods that now exist.Currently, there are two main methods to play the game online, Magic: the Gathering Online and Magic Duels. The latter was pretty innovative for a game that, though it led the way as far as paper card games goes, lagged behind trading card games in the digital space like Blizzard’s Hearthstone. Unlike its much older sibling Magic: the Gathering Online, it was free to play, allowing you to earn the currency you need to buy packs of random cards through playing the game, though players could always also buy that currency with real money as well.Critiqued for dumbing down the game, Duels did carefully control what cards from the paper sets made it onto this platform, preferring to have this game serve more as a teaching tool for new players and a more casual setting than the older online client that came before it.Magic: the Gathering Online on the other hand serves as a more direct analog to the paper game, especially in the competitive space. It is where professional players practice the decks that they will eventually have in paper at many of the large tournaments that happen year round.Getting into Online is rather daunting, however, as it costs $10 US just to make your account, which comes with a nearly worthless collection of cards to start with. Furthermore, the game has its own complicated economy, based on its own currency and involving trading that currency, which you buy from Wizards, to third party vendors for cards for a fraction of that currency and then holding the change as store credit. People spend real money on their digital collections, though much less than they do in paper, and more still to get into events to play competitively.So where does Arena fit in? In the demo videos Wizards has released thus far, it looks a lot like the gameplay sits somewhere between Duels and Online, with a “freemium” model of being free to play with add ons you could buy and microtransactions if you don’t want to grind through daily quests; but still with the complexities of real paper Magic. For people experienced with the game, but more accustomed to how digital games look in the 21st century, this will appeal to them. But what will Wizards do with Online? What will players who put real money into their digital collections, not just Online but also on Duels, do with their investments? Will pros move to this new game? Will Wizards support both, and if so, what will each cater to?I don’t assume to know the mind of the corporate executives in charge of how we play the most popular card game worldwide, but here’s what I think. Arena will eventually, probably within the decade, supplant Online as the face of digital Magic: the Gathering if it’s successful at all. I hope that the powers that be think about the resources players have poured into their coffers via the digital games that came before this new offering, and allow for some sort of recourse. I don’t mean straight money or credit, as Online players, at least, can liquidate their collections for some of their value at least, but be able to port some or all of their collections from either Duels and/or Online to Arena. We know that when Wizards shifted from Duels to Arena, the servers were left active, but they stopped publishing new sets on the platform, so it could be something like that for Online.It’s a new age in card gaming, and things are changing fast, and I hope that Wizards of the Coast thinks carefully about how to change with them.
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